Eric Newby - A short walk in the Hindu Kush

Eric Newby, who died on Friday aged 86, was the author of some of the best books in the canon of English travel writing, notably A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush and Love and War in the Apennines.

Informed by a pin-sharp eye and a self-deprecating persona, Newby's literary style was inspired by the comic portrait of the Englishman abroad presented in the writings of Alexander Kinglake, Robert Byron and Evelyn Waugh. In a preface to the book that made Newby's reputation, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958), Waugh identified the central elements of this humorous tradition: its quintessentially English spirit of amateurism and its tone of ironic understatement.
For Newby's "short walk" was in reality an arduous journey through the more remote parts of Afghanistan, culminating in a dangerous assault on Mir Samir, an unclimbed glacial peak of 20,000ft. The sum of his preparation for the mountaineering ahead was a brief weekend on the Welsh hills.

Some of the book's comedy is genuine, as when tribesmen test the waterproof nature of Newby's watch by immersing it in a goat stew. But much of its humour stems from a self-ridicule that borders on melancholy, such as the description of the exquisite pain Newby suffered from walking in new boots, literally flaying his feet. He was fortunately far tougher than his literary persona suggested.

A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush climaxes with the most celebrated meeting between travellers since that of Livingstone and Stanley, when a tottering Newby encounters the striding form of Wilfred Thesiger on the banks of the Upper Panjshir.

The meeting is presented as that of inept amateur and professional adventurer, with Thesiger representing a certain Englishness to be both admired and satirised. When Newby and his companion begin blowing up air mattresses to cushion their rocky beds, Thesiger reacts with immortal disdain: "God, you must be a couple of pansies."

George Eric Newby was born in Hammersmith, west London, on December 6 1919.
His father was a partner in a firm of wholesale dressmakers but harboured dreams of escape. As a child he had run away to sea, reaching Millwall before he was recaptured. His nautical ambitions resurfaced as a passion for rowing; he spent the afternoon of his wedding day sculling on the Thames with his best man, missing his honeymoon boat train to Paris.

His tearful bride was a former dress model at Harrods.
Young Eric grew up in Barnes, overlooking the river. From the start, his father passed on to him his own escapist tendencies, notably by reading to him from Arthur Mee's The Children's Colour Book of Lands and Peoples.

Eric was also inspired to travel by hearing a lecture at his school, St Paul's, by Apsley Cherry-Garrard, one of Scott's party and the author of The Worst Journey In The World.
One of his father's frequent fiscal crises, and Eric's persistent failure to pass algebra, saw him removed from St Paul's at 16. He joined an advertising agency, where he spent much of his time riding a bicycle around the office. He was mercifully released from this when his employers lost the Kellogg's account, and in 1938, aged 18, he signed on the four-masted Finnish barque Moshulu, engaged in the 30,000 mile-round grain trade between Ireland and Australia.
Newby later recounted his experiences in his first book, The Last Grain Race (1956), which gave a vivid description of the claustrophobic life of a sailing ship's crew.

It gave notice of his powers of observation, his unforced prose and his taste for the ridiculous. One memorable set-piece describes Newby's attempts at dentistry in a swaying fo'c'sle after an alcoholic Christmas lunch, with most of the molten gutta-percha spilling down the throat of the ailing seaman. Newby also survived several close encounters with death, being once almost swept overboard in a hurricane, the rope stripped from his grasp by the sea "as though a gentle giant had smoothed his hands over my knuckles."

In 1940 Newby joined the Black Watch, serving in India before volunteering for the Special Boat Section, then operating out of Alexandria. In August 1942 his detachment was sent to sabotage a German airfield at Catania in Sicily. This highly dangerous mission, unpromisingly codenamed Operation Whynot, was designed to aid the passage of the Pedestal convoy, bound with vital oil to Malta. When Newby landed from his dinghy it was the first time he had set foot in Europe. The operation was not successful — no one had thought to tell the SBS men that there were 1,000 German troops at the airfield — and Newby was captured by fishermen after failing to rendezvous with the waiting submarine.

He was sent to the prison camp at Fontanellato, in the Po Valley. The camp's hierarchy, he later wrote, resembled that of a public school, divided into the "socially OK and the rest", its kindly headmaster the prison commandant. With his connivance, the prisoners broke out into the countryside after the Italians surrendered in September 1943, Newby hobbling on a broken ankle. He related his subsequent adventures in perhaps his best and most original book, Love and War in the Apennines (1971).

Having been initially helped by his future wife, Wanda, Newby was later sheltered, at great risk, by the Italian peasantry. He passed the winter of 1943 on a farm, clearing the stones from a vast field, and then hid in a cave. Once he met a German officer out butterfly hunting, who recognised Newby but preferred to share a beer rather than ruin a sunny day with the business of war.
The book is studded with exquisite descriptions of weather and landscape, notably an epic climb to the high point of the range. From there Newby saw the whole sweep of the Alps round to the Dolomites and down to the Ligurian Sea.

He was betrayed and captured after five months, and spent the rest of the war at camps in Czechoslovakia and Germany. He was demobilised in 1945 with a Military Cross, belatedly awarded for his bravery during the Sicilian raid.

Newby then worked for MI9, which was helping those who had shielded escaped prisoners. This allowed him to return to Italy and win Wanda Skof for his wife. They were married in the Bardi Chapel of the Church of Santa Croce, Florence, in 1946. Newby afterwards undertook other intelligence work, including the chance identification of Central Asian missile sites while returning by air from the Hindu Kush.

After the war, Newby spent 10 years in his father's dressmaking firm, later recalling his time in Something Wholesale (1962). Although his imagination was engaged by the trade's creations (one memorable horror he christened "Grand Guignol"), he was not suited to the grind of routine and responsibility. Nor did he enjoy the financial uncertainties of business. Once he and his father took a taxi to a meeting with the Inland Revenue; they returned home by bus.

Newby worked for the couture house Worth Paquin from 1955 to 1956 and then, while starting to write, for the publishers Secker & Warburg for three years. He then returned to fashion as the central dress buyer for John Lewis.

In 1963 he and Wanda were the first to travel the 1,200 miles of the Ganges by rowing boat, a journey described in Slowly Down the Ganges (1966). Newby later made the first descent by a European of the Wakwayowkastic, a tributary of the Moose River in Ontario. Thereafter he was travel editor of the Observer from 1964 to 1973, and wrote several more books, often travelling with Wanda.

His later output, however, including The Big Red Train Ride (1978), On The Shores of the Mediterranean (1984) and Round Ireland in Slow Gear (1987), fell markedly away from the exceptional standards he had set with his early work. He seemed to have a gift for distilling the accidental experiences of his youth, but not for searching out new ones. His later writing was often amusing, but lacked freshness, its tone and observations perhaps too professional.

For many years Newby lived in Dorset but he had latterly moved to Surrey. He tended to play up his unworldiness for interviewers, but was actually rather practical, happily pocketing renewals by film companies of their options on Love and War in the Apennines.

He was a highly accomplished photographer; among several collections of his images are What the Traveller Saw (1989) and Learning the Ropes (1999), the photographs of his time aboard Moshulu.
Eric Newby was appointed CBE in 1994.

He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Royal Geographic Society.
He is survived by his wife and by their son and daughter.

Major Henry Druce - SAS officer who ambushed a German column while dressed in corduroy trousers and a silk top hat.

Major Henry Druce, who has died aged 85, won the DSO and the Croix de Guerre while serving with the SAS behind enemy lines in the Second World War.
In 1944 Druce was serving as a captain in the 2nd Special Air Service Regiment (2 SAS). On August 12, as part of an operation code-named Loyton, he was in command of a small advance party which was dropped into the Vosges. Their objective was to reconnoitre the area, contact the French Resistance, establish a suitable dropping zone for the main group and select targets for future action.

Druce was not supposed to have gone on the mission at all; but, at the last minute, the troop commander lost his nerve and pulled out. Druce was rushed to the airfield, where he was quickly briefed. His party was dropped 40 miles west of Strasbourg in an area of ravines and deeply wooded mountains. He set up a base camp, but had to move out quickly when he discovered that the location had been betrayed to the enemy. A week later he reported that 5,000 German troops were combing the area for them. His difficulties increased when the loss of the group's wireless sets cut communications with their base.

For the next two weeks, Druce's party was hunted and harried, and was often short of food and close to exhaustion. Yet it managed to dodge the German patrols and inflicted casualties on the enemy which were out of all proportion to the size of their force. One morning Druce led his Jeeps into the town of Moussey just as an SS commander was assembling his men. Druce accelerated towards the Germans, opened fire at 40 yards and, having expended several pans of ammunition, took off into the mountains.

He inflicted many casualties and caused so much confusion that 250 troops withdrew from the town in disorder in the belief that a greatly superior force had arrived. On September 29 he and a comrade headed west on foot to the American lines, carrying a Panzer division order of battle which had been passed to them by a Maquis commander. They were challenged by German sentries and passed through the enemy lines three times before handing over the documents.
Druce flew back to England early in October. He was awarded an immediate DSO, and the citation paid tribute to the officer's skill, daring and complete disregard for his own safety.
Henry Carey Druce was born on May 21 1921 in The Hague (his mother was Dutch), and educated at Sherborne and RMC Sandhurst before being commissioned into the Middlesex Regiment. He volunteered for the newly-formed Glider Pilot Regiment and was posted to 21st Independent Parachute Company.

He was fluent in French, Dutch and Flemish and was seconded to MI6 in 1943; but his service in Holland was cut short when his cover was blown by a Dutch agent who turned out to be working for the Germans. After Operation Loyton, Druce was promoted to major and rejoined 2 SAS in Holland. In April 1945 he was ordered by Brigadier Mike Calvert to lead a column of 10 Jeeps north from Arnhem to penetrate the German lines. Druce protested, saying that the war was almost over, the German positions in that area were still strongly defended and that it was one of the most ridiculous schemes he had ever heard.
"Druce," said Calvert, "are you a regular officer?"
"Yes, sir," replied Druce.
"Well, I think you should be shot," exclaimed the Brigadier.
Druce complied with the instruction, and, operating behind the lines, his troop allowed the retreating Germans no respite. On one occasion his Jeeps, each mounted with four Vickers machine guns, took cover in a wood and ambushed a German column with devastating effect. A comrade said afterwards that Druce was dressed for this action in corduroy trousers and a black silk top hat.

At Deelen, the troop was in a café awaiting the arrival of the Canadians before liberating the airport when a German motorcyclist arrived. In his saddle-bags was a ham that he had stolen from Arnhem. Druce, still in his top hat, ordered the man to get off his bike and, when he did not respond, seized the ham and knocked him off the machine with it.

After the war, Druce rejoined MI6, first in Holland and then in Indonesia until the latter achieved independence in 1949. Having left government service he worked in Anglo-Dutch plantations in Java until 1951 and, after 18 months' travelling, moved with his family to Canada.
There he built up a shipping business on Newfoundland, and later in Quebec and the Cayman Islands, before retiring in 1981 and settling in Victoria, British Columbia, where he remained active in business, enjoyed golf and kept in touch with old comrades' associations.

Druce was awarded the Croix de Guerre with Palm for his services with the French Resistance and was made an Officer in the Order of Orange-Nassau for his work in Indonesia.

Henry Druce died on January 4. He married, in 1942, Mary Docker, who survives him with a son and two daughters.